0ne c0mma Zer0
10 start
20 if Nick Jaina
30 of Binary Dolls
40 gives his input
50 goto article
run
by Lori Englert
Binary Dolls are currently putting the finishing touches on their latest album titled Seesaw Sunday Nights, and just returned from a tour through California a couple of weeks ago. Brothers, Nick and Matt are also Stickyback Vinyl and previous projects include a solo album for Nick titled Snakes and Umbrellas, while Matt played in Felt Gunderson of San Diego. Tony was a member of Birthday which was signed to Warner Brothers Records, but the band broke up before they ever released an album.
On Seesaw Sunday Nights, the Dolls have intentionally veered away from creating a "catchy" sound, and upon first listening one would quite agree that they were successful in doing so. But as with all great albums, the more times you spin it, the more captivating it becomes. Soon it grows into an addiction and the urge to find and figure out what is behind all of those obscure lyrics cannot be avoided. Especially in Bombshelter in Leningrad, the most replayable track on the album and A Submarine powered by Human Hands where it is strongly apparent that there are some notably profound dimensions to explore inside the powerfully reserved boy behind the mic. As if a poem can be broken down and still retain its beauty, this is an attempt to uncover what lies beneath without cracking the vase.
Let's start with Submarine. Is there a story behind this song?
The first submarine in the history of the world was invented for warfare and implemented by the Confederates during the Civil War. It was an iron tube that maybe four or five men could fit in. They had to crouch down inside and turn a crank with their hands to make the submarine move. It took them hours just to go a couple of miles. There was a harpoon on the front with a powder keg on it. To attack a ship, the men cranked the submarine stealthily up to their target, harpooned the ship with the powder keg, and then they cranked in reverse to get a little distance away, where they triggered the keg with a switch they had inside the submarine. The submarine was incredibly dangerous for its own passengers. It sank several times and actually killed more of its own men than it did the enemy's men. But it was successful one time in attacking a Union ship and sinking it. I am very clausterphobic, so it's difficult for me to imagine what it was like to crouch down with four other men in this shoddy iron submarine, with only your own hands to power you through the ocean. And all the men smoked pipes while they did this! That would just kill me. But the Confederates were never short of volunteers to pilot the submarine, even after it sank and they pulled it up and dragged out the dead bodies.
This is the first of several songs on this record that deal with war and confinement in impossible situations. It's comparable to being poor, always worrying about how you're going to make the next rent payment, living underground in a basement, in a country that is terrified of a faceless, unknown enemy, and is very willing to curtail liberties and rights in order to make everyone safe. That's basically the situation I was in for most of 2002, and in addition to that, I was working with my wife Amanda, who is Canadian, on getting her temporary residential status in the United States. This involved proving we were financially capable of supporting ourselves, proving that we really loved each other, and going in front of a scary person at the INS, who quizzed us on each other's personal information. Such a simple thing as what country you're born in can make things so complicated when you're in love with someone from another country. But you have to just use all the power you have to make your way through it and eventually you'll come to a wide open space where you can be yourself and not have to be afraid anymore. And when you look back on the time you spent in prison, you realize it was actually meaningful and has made you stronger, and it's important to remember that. Impossible situations lead to impossible solutions. Think of all the innovations made in the desperation of war. On one hand, war is a terrible, destructive force, but on the other hand, you can't deny that it has happened and still happens, and that people live through it and it's a part of their lives, and maybe it's even made them stronger people. A trial by fire, I suppose.
In Bombshelter in Leningrad you sing about a couple feeling shameful because they  were in love when "so many people didn't make it out of the city that year." With the war in Iraq this album seems so timely. Do you think that Americans, being interconnected via the media yet so far away from the devastation, feel guilty being happy in love or perhaps have guilt over even more mundane things such as simple boredom? Do you?
Yeah, of course. As soon as Bush gave Sadaam 48 hours to leave Iraq or face the consequences, I felt a horrible feeling in my stomach that hasn't gone away. Beyond the politics of the whole thing, it's just disappointing that we still resolve our disputes through violence. And yeah, there's a hesitation of, "Can we still live our lives? Is it wrong to have fun?" But then, I remember seeing somewhere that historians estimate that there have been only maybe 45 days in all of human history where there hasn't been a war going on somewhere. Or maybe it was only 25. But obviously the world has always been full of violence, and this just happens to be a very high-profile war that stirs the emotions of a lot of people.
That song that you mention is about the Siege of Leningrad during World War II, where the Nazis surrounded the Russian city of Leningrad for 900 days and stopped everything from coming in or going out, and over 600,000 people died. The Nazis also carried on bombing raids over the city, so if you can imagine—and you can't really—but if you try to imagine what it would be like to be in your home town, and everyone is slowly starving to death and so weak that they can't carry the dead bodies out of the street, while bombs are dropping from the sky, and this goes on for almost three years... well, life would have to go on, and people would still fall in love, but how would that feel, in retrospect, to have had any kind of fun while this disaster was happening?
I think guilt would be one of the feelings, but you have to carry on anyway. So, to compare that to us feeling guilty now about people dying in Iraq is a little unbalanced, because we're just watching it on television, and we can turn it off if it gets to be too much. Certainly, though, I and many other people can't think of much else beyond war right now, and as someone who writes songs, I think it's important to tell the stories, and explore the feelings of people experiencing war. For me, it's more healthy than writing a song saying, "Stop the war, war is bad," because there are so many subleties in life. If you want somebody to see your point of view, I think it's more productive to convey your feelings, and try to illuminate the little truths and maybe that will lead the listener to a bigger answer. Or a bigger question. Or whatever.
Omaha follows Leningrad as an extension of it yet is a little more lively and...is that a kazoo I hear? The first two lines seem to explain the unusual juxtoposition; "Somewhere a light is offering a pretty contrast." Talk about Omaha.
Uhm, a kazoo? No.
There's about four tracks of guitars on there, each put through some wildly different effects, all done in one take each. I had the basic tracks recorded, and Matt came over and listened to it, and I gave him one chance for each guitar sound. He did one that sounds like a dentist's drill, and a melodic one, and then a really dirty one, and they all had so much space in between them that they worked out to support the song in a weird way.
The lyrics are a little more abstract than the others. It's from the point of view of someone who's kind of crazy and paranoid, and has these problems taming the ideas in his head. He says, "There's a murder in my head and it wants to be solved." And the only letters he gets are from Omaha, because that's where all the credit card companies are from, so you know when you get a letter from Omaha, it's bad news, because you don't have any friends in Omaha, right? I don't. And letters from credit card companies essentially feel like blackmail, because, you know, it's a "pay us or else" sort of thing.
Actually, shortly after writing this song, I discovered on the internet that there is someone in Omaha who put one of my songs on a mixtape, and then put that mixtape on their website. That was kind of weird. So maybe I do have a friend in Omaha.
I guess it's kind of a strange connection, because Omaha and Leningrad are musically linked together as one song. I think the connection in my head was that Omaha was one of the code words they used in World War II for when they were preparing to invade in Normandy, and so they're linked by that war.
I'm getting quite an education here. You wrote a song called Star E. Rose after the coffee shop on Alberta but nothing about this song suggests anything about coffee. So what is this song really about?
No, I'm not a coffee fan. It was written while I was living in New Orleans and it didn't have a title until we moved here, and we live right near the Star E Rose, and I don't know why, but I thought that that was such a neat name for a coffee shop, much better than some pun on "beans" or "grounds". So I wanted to make it the title of a song, and that song happened to have the word "star" in the first line, so it seemed to fit.
It actually seems to be about a fading old movie star, who dies in obscurity and is buried in a cheap coffin. Kind of like Eleanor Rigby, if she ever did anything before she was a spinster. But then it touches on the transitory nature of life, comparing reincarnation to a camera trick, and supposing that anyone who's died alone is really, hey, maybe out on some adventure in the desert, or who knows what happens to a spirit when the body dies.
That's all I can really say about that song, except that whenever I sing the line, "He's really in a another world, another life, holding open the doors for all the corporate shills to walk on through," I think about the time I worked on Wall Street (yes, that Wall Street) as a temp worker in an office high up in the Trump Building. Every morning I got off the subway underneath the World Trade Center, and there was always a homeless man holding open the doors in the front of the building for all these business people. And every afternoon, walking back through the Trade Center to the subway, he was there, holding open as many doors as he could, trying to get some spare change. Now that it's all gone, I wonder what's happened to that guy, and maybe somehow he got his break when the towers fell and got his life together, and now he's doing really well, when all the people he held the doors open for— well some of them anyway— died. I don't know. That's what I think about when I sing that song.
A bittersweet irony. You offer a melancholy but thoughtful way of looking at things. Aside from the lyrical composition I'd also like to leave a little room to talk about the music itself. Like what bands had an influence on you and in an attempt not to ask you to categorize yourself could you give the reader a more definitive idea of who or what you sound like?
We sound like grapes being squashed.
My musical influences in the broad sense are Paul Simon, Tom Waits, umm... those are the big ones. Those are people who, when I heard them, I said, "Okay, this is what I want to do with my time." And they set me on my path of how I approach music, what aspects of music are important to me.
For me, a big thing is the lyrics, and a sort of sophistication and intricacy in the musical composition. And a big thing with those two is, lyrically, a mixture of street vernacular with more refined poetry, all in a way that, when sung, sounds very natural. That's what I'm always striving for in the lyrics: a combination of slang and informal speech, and then really proper verse, that all comes out sounding like someone just talking to you. And I don't like it when the melody takes precedence over the meaning of the words. Like when the melody forces inflections that are unnatural if you were just saying the words. I feel like melodies should be natural extensions of normal speech patterns. It's just weird when, to fit in with the melody, somebody sings a line with awkward inflections on the words. I wish I could think of an example.
But since I've been playing music more regularly, over the last few years, it tends to be people I  know and play shows with that influence me. Like, the whole electronic-style beats with trumpet thing, I stole that from the band Kid Quiz, who are my friends. And I get a lot of ideas for ways to compose songs from the way my friend Sean Hayashi— who's in a Sacramento band called Umbravox— writes. Things like working in both the major and minor of a chord in the same song— like going from D minor to G major, and then later in the song, going from D major to G minor— I get that from Sean. And Veda Hille from Vancouver, she composes songs in such an obtuse way...I guess I've always composed obtusely, but people like her and Myshkin give me confidence to write obtusely, and about subjects that you don't normally hear about in songs. Myshkin— whose band, Myshkin's Ruby Warblers I sometimes play in— is really good at writing songs about these horrible tradgedies, like slavery and war, and making them beautiful. Maybe by playing with her, that inspired me to write about dark events in history.
Just by being out, meeting people, and playing shows, you get so influenced by what you see other people doing, what equipment they use. There's always something I learn with any interaction with another musician, even if it's just learning what I absolutely DON'T like. That becomes as important as the people you were influenced by long ago before you ever thought you'd take music so seriously.
I think the sound of Binary Dolls is unique. I sing and play trumpet, while Tony plays the Fender-Rhodes keyboard. We have a laptop that plays sampled drum loops. Matt plays guitar and also has a radio that he takes samples of, and loops them while we're playing. So, whatever he happens to find on the radio that night becomes the bed of sound that he then distorts with all sorts of ring modulators and circuitry boxes. We're fairly mellow and quiet, I guess. And it's safe to say that anybody who uses a laptop doesn't rock. We have some songs on the album that were recorded with a live drummer, and I still reserve the right to get a drummer in the band in the future. On the album, we really tried to blur the distinction between a drum machine and live drums. Some songs were started off with a drum machine part, and then we went in and replaced every fake drum sound with a sample of a real drum sound. Other times the live drums were recorded straight through, trying to sound like a loop. Other times, they sound more like real rock drums.
But the whole band is based on fairly proper songwriting. It rarely gets as ethereal as this description might make it sound.
Binary Dolls are:
Nick Jaina - sings and plays trumpet and Fender - Rhodes
Tony Schatz - plays keyboard, saw, sings backup and juggles
Matt Dabrowiak - plays guitar and tunes in a radio to pertinent noise and runs it through frequency oscillating, sonic bending circuit boxes
www.perilymph.org
Lori Englert is a contributing writer to mlp and friend of many cool bands.
|
